Editorial: SC Farmers Market continues to produce problematic decisions | Editorials

South Carolina’s State Farmers Market has been plagued by questions and problems from the moment the idea of relocating it from its longtime home across from USC’s Williams-Brice Stadium first emerged more than two decades ago.

The state forced the Agriculture Department’s hand by selling the property to USC, which wanted it for pricy game-day parking. But there were plenty of missteps in the transition, from the bidding war the state encouraged between Richland and Lexington counties to small retailers’ threatened boycott of the Lexington site that made clear that the state agency’s priority was the large wholesale vendors who are based at the market.

The 2010 move triggered two critical Legislative Audit Council reviews of the finances of the deal and turned off local retail customers, who never embraced the new, more remote facility near Interstates 26 and 77 in rural Lexington County.

So it was welcome news that, more than a decade later, the state is finally following through on proposals to build a new retail farmers market near the old site — a market to cater to individuals who just want to pick up some fresh produce and the small farmers who want to sell to them.

As The Post and Courier’s Skylar Laird reports, the new market will be funded with $4 million in state earmarks originally designated for an expansion of the capitol city’s convention center, which Columbia leaders wisely put on hold. The new market also will help green up a food desert southeast of Columbia that is home to great poverty.

Of course, that hardly matters to people in Charleston, or pretty much anywhere outside the Midlands, who have their own local farmers markets, many aided by an Agriculture Department that seems to have learned some valuable lessons about the value of retail markets.

What could matter is the other news out of the State Farmers Market. Jessica Holdman reports that the latest controversy involves contracts the state Department of Administration approved to move the departments of Education and Natural Resources out of their longtime homes near the Statehouse and into new facilities at the new State Farmers Market in Lexington County.

The contracts with State Ports Authority Chairman Bill Stern will cost the state 20% more than competing bids, or $133 million over 20 years. Mr. Stern is the Columbia developer who sold land at the Farmers Market to the Agriculture Department in 2013, drawing criticism. A state audit said the agency should have gotten an independent appraisal rather than relying on numbers Mr. Stern provided and that he should have been required to report the campaign donations he had given to Agriculture Commissioner Hugh Weathers.

It was never clear that the state got a bad deal in 2013, and it’s unclear if it’s getting a bad deal this time. But it’s also not clear that it’s a good deal, because the state moved forward with the deals that were bid when the real estate market was very different than it is today. It should have rebid after the pandemic and global supply chain problems increased Columbia’s commercial rental inventory and caused construction costs to skyrocket.

For his part, Mr. Stern says he held his bid at the 2019 level, and he denied that his significant political connections had swayed the contracts his way. Regardless of whether there was any politicking involved, there certainly was room for better decision-making.

Ms. Holdman reports that the bids received from prospective landlords before the pandemic were less than ideal, which is why the agencies decided to go with Mr. Stern’s more expensive and more remote offering. In the fall of 2020, she reports, Natural Resources asked about trying to get a new round of bids. But the Administration Department said there wasn’t enough time to do that for the next budget debate, and the agencies apparently decided it was more important to get their request in for the 2021-22 budget than to make sure they got it right.

Compounding the problem, the Legislature’s top budget writers at the time, Sen. Hugh Leatherman and Rep. Murrell Smith, instructed the Administration Department that the leases did not need to be approved by the Legislature’s Joint Bond Review Committee or the State Fiscal Accountability Authority.

People love to complain about the lengthy process for approving large purchases by state agencies, but those reviews likely would have resulted in someone asking why the agencies were taking the most expensive bids, or why they were taking bids that by then were nearly two years old — questions that didn’t come up when the Legislature considered those two lines among the thousands in the state budget.

It’s possible that the state wouldn’t have come out any better by seeking a new round of bids. But this latest chapter in the long and messy saga of the Lexington County farmers market property strikes us as a lot of state officials asking “What does the law require me to do at a minimum?” rather than “What’s the best I can do to serve the interests of the taxpayers?”